WDD LIVE 024 – A Couple Rants + Random Insights + Q&A

1 0:00:00 What’s up, what’s up, what’s up everybody? Welcome back WDD Live.

Let’s see who’s in the house today. I made a very basic critical error here. My mouse level is at 10%. I don’t know how long that 10% is going to last.

Usually I mean you could probably get pretty far on 10% but I don’t want to take any chances so as I ramble here and talk and welcome everybody to the stream I’m going to plug that bad boy in because you know the geniuses at Apple if we’re ranting today we could just start with this. The geniuses at Apple obviously put the charging port on the bottom of the mouse so if you you know need to charge the mouse you’re forced to take a break. You cannot get anything done. You literally can’t use it.

Can’t use it while it’s charging. Best, my favorite feature of the Apple mouse right there is yeah just forced to take a break whenever you need to charge. Okay we’re welcoming Ryan in, Maren, the Hunzis here, Simon, Charlie, Sandro. Oh I’m seeing some new faces today.

New faces is always really good. David Das, Kevin Roberts is here looking forward to seeing if I’m a chump today says Kevin Roberts. I would elevate that comment to the screen but I don’t have a mouse at the moment. It’s over here.

It’s over here charging up. We’re just going to sneak in a percent here and there. You know I think that’s going to get us through the screen, the stream, sorry. Pedro’s here.

Oh my god, don’t get me started on that mouse. It’s a way to force you to have a break. Kevin says good morning. Calisthenics Ireland, not even two minutes in and we already got a rant.

Will be a good episode. Oh, this is going to be a good one. This is going to be a good one. I just decided today, you know, there’s some stuff I got to get off my chest, especially regarding Elementor.

This has been, you know, I’m also feeling like it’s getting a little hot in here. Hold on. Oh geez. The wall switch is not on so I can’t turn the fan on.

This is we’re off to a fantastic start today. I might get up in a second and toggle this fan on. It’s a little it’s it this is why they call it hot lanta. It’s a little it’s a little hot here.

Okay so yeah just some Elementor stuff that I got it I was gonna create a whole video on Elementor and I decided you know it’s like whatever whatever it’s it’s it would be it would be great to rile up the Elementor you know user base because I’m sure people would take this that video and share it around and all the Elementor groups and get all butthurt about it and all up in their feelings and but it would bring in a lot more eyeballs but it wouldn’t really give anybody outside of the Elementor community, anything really of value. So I was like, whatever. I could do it for self-promotion purposes, but at the end of the day, that’s not really what this channel is about. The channel is about helpful content, insightful content, making people better developers and all the rest, right?

So I try to stick to rants that have some sort of inherent value to them in your workflow, in your day-to-day life as somebody working with WordPress and these page builders and things like that. It is really good to know certain things. Like the things I’m gonna talk about today about Elementor actually translate into your workflow. It’s things you should know why these things are bad and why to stay away from them.

So yeah, I decided maybe not make the entire Elementor video, but there’s still some things I got to get off my chest because I was actually watching an Elementor creator the other day. Dude’s got like over 100,000 subscribers, over 100,000, like very popular channel, primarily does Elementor trainings. I’m watching this guy work in Elementor and I’m just like, what the F is going on here. And so I’m gonna highlight one of the things that he was recommending that you do in Elementor as an Elementor user.

And this is mind boggling stuff. Not, I’m like, you know, you could, you have a lot of videos that you’ll see online and it just feels like, ah, you’re nitpicking, right? You’re kind of nitpicking people. This is not nitpicking stuff.

This is like, as I say, just baffling. Like, what are we doing here? That kind of thing. I try my best not to just nitpick.

Like if I harp on something, if I rant about something, it’s because that thing is big, it’s critical, it’s important. I don’t really like to nitpick. So, you know, you’re going to see. You’re going to see.

It’s, woo, Woo, yeah, baffling. Okay, rant about Elementor, what? I thought you loved it. You must be new here, Jason.

No, no, we are not, we do not like the Elementor. I also think I have another thing to say about Gutenberg because I’ve been working more with Gutenberg because we are getting ACSS integrated with Generate. And I found out a very, very lovely, very lovely feature of, I wouldn’t call it a feature, but it is a lovely aspect of Gutenberg that I ran into, which is another fun, a fun thing. You know, people ask me why Gutenberg is a trashcan and I have plenty of examples, big laundry list of examples of why Gutenberg is a trashcan.

And I just added to it. I just added like two things to it. Yeah, two major things to it. So let me put that in my notes.

Let me unplug my mouse here. Let me get over to my notes. Let’s make sure that we hit on those two things today. All right, let me give you a little outline of what we’re going to be doing.

Gutenberg, all right, at that and okay, got those. All right, perfect. All right, We’re going to talk about automatic tokens and frames for Figma. Obviously we just put out a teaser yesterday for that.

We’ll talk just briefly about that. We’re going to talk about three outrageous Elementor workflow features. Again, not nitpicking, I’m using the word outrageous. These are just absolutely, that’s the perfect word for it, absolutely outrageous things about Elementor.

We’ll talk about the Gutenberg, the two new little goodies that I found, those presents that you never want but somebody gives them to you. And then we’re going to answer a really good question that somebody put on the channel down below in the comments. I believe it was on the last WDD Live, I talked about ugly web designs converting really really really well because I talked about how copy and offer are the most important parts of a website. And so a watcher, a viewer of the channel of WDD Live actually wrote wrote a very insightful comment and question and I could not reply to it.

As you know I like to reply to every single comment that gets left on the channel because I feel like if you guys take the time to participate and comment so should I you know giving you a reply to those things but there are some things that people ask that I can’t reply in a YouTube like it’s it’s not enough space it’s not it’s not a good format for a reply. So I’ve extracted this question and comment and we’re going to discuss it today. Then we’re going to look up the best web designs of 2023 because that dovetails in to that question and comment. We’re just going to take a look at what all these list sites, these listicle sites out here believe are the best web designs of 2023.

And I think there’s gonna be some interesting discussions that come from that, because how we’re defining best web designs of 2023 as an industry, and really, I mean, this has been every year, 2022, 2021, whatever, it’s every year. Best, like how, best how? That’s, and we’re gonna see very quickly what they’re talking about and how absolutely irrelevant it is. And this kind of also ties into questions that we get about frames, questions that we get about frames for Figma, it all kind of ties in together and it’s an important conversation to have.

All right, before we really dive in, let’s go ahead and see what the chat is up to. Clients raised eyebrows when I asked them to use the Beaver Builder page builder. After that, I’d be loath to ask them to breakdance I mean it’s just an unnecessary level of unprofessionalism yes be I am NOT a fan of beaver builder I’m sorry I just plugged in just plugged in my mouse again yeah I’m not a fan of beaver builder and you know out of all of them beaver builder Elementor breakdance breakdance is the best out of all of those. You know, if you’re going to go the page builder developers think I’m too stupid to build websites the right way, so you know, they’re going to create this workflow for me.

That’s what all of those do, Divi, Elementor, that’s Beaver Builder, they all take that approach. If that’s the approach you want to go with, then Breakdance is the best of those approaches, but it’s just as a general approach I don’t think it’s a great thing to buy into. Don’t think the future, don’t you think the future is Gutenberg? That’s a really good question Christian.

Do I think the future is Gutenberg? It’s one of those situations where we’re forced, we’re being force-fed Gutenberg. That’s what’s happening here. We’re being force-fed Gutenberg.

So I said to my team the other day, it actually may have been in a Facebook discussion as well. I can’t remember where this took place. But this came shortly after the two new goodies that I found inside of Gutenberg trying to get everything ready for GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks. And I just am at the point where it’s like, Gutenberg should, the entire Gutenberg project should be scrapped, they should start over, they should fire everybody that was involved with it, they should hire a new team and they should reimagine what they were trying to do.

That’s where the point that we’re at. It is horrific. It’s absolutely horrific what’s been done with Gutenberg. So that’s really what I think about Gutenberg.

Now is that going to happen? No, no. That’s never going to happen. It’s not even in the realm of possibility.

What’s going to happen is they’re going to continue shoving it down your throat against your consent. That’s what’s going to continue to happen. And people are going to, you know, the quicklies of the world and generate presses, generate blocks, and probably even frames. We’re going to have to do our best with what we’re given and try to make it as palatable of an experience as possible.

That sucks that that’s the situation we’re in but that’s the situation we’re in. They’re not going to, they can’t fix it, they don’t have the proper vision to fix it, they don’t have the proper leadership to fix it, they don’t have the proper anything to fix it. So what they’re going to continue to do is just force-feed you, Gutenberg, until everybody just accepts that okay this is this is what we what we have available to us. Which means that probably third-party builders like Bricks and Oxygen and you know Breakdance anything that loads in you know it doesn’t try to leverage Gutenberg those are going to be around for you know a very long time because Gutenberg is never going to get it shit together.

But there’s a lot of people who don’t want to use those like the extra layer tools I guess we could call them like it’s putting an extra layer on top of WordPress. A lot of people just don’t want to use that, which I don’t understand. I don’t buy the argument that it’s safer in any capacity. People have this idea that, oh, well, the builder could blow up overnight, you know, like it could be an oxygen type situation or whatever.

I mean, there’s no guarantee if you’re using anything that integrates with Gutenberg. Like you’re left with a bunch of short codes and like I don’t know what how’s that different how is it how is it any different something simply because it’s in Gutenberg. The only thing is that you know you can I guess open a page faster and and start editing but we’re talking about like mere seconds between the different workflows so I don’t buy really any of the arguments I just think it’s um if I can stay out of Gutenberg then I do. That’s my goal in life.

My goal in life is to stay out of Gutenberg. Bricks allows me to stay out of Gutenberg. So that’s fantastic. Okay, funny going on Elementor.

I’m currently trying to switch off of it going to Bricks. Side note thoughts on Divi versus Bricks. Divi and Elementor are roughly the exact same thing. It’s just a different visual layer and workflow.

They have the exact same philosophy though. The philosophy is you know screw best practices and classes and all this other stuff just add a bunch of stuff to your page and style everything independently and we’ll give you something called presets which is kind of like classes but not not nearly as functional or helpful as classes. And you know learn the page builder. Don’t learn web design, learn the page builder just learn element or or learn divi and you’ll be good to go You won’t know anything about web design, but you you know you’ll at least be able to put some pages together They’ll be they’ll be complete ass you know the dom will be a nightmare.

They won’t be accessible but you know you’ll you’ll get something going and it’s kind of like buying a camera a DSLR putting it on auto and calling yourself a photographer and then selling photography packages. That’s kind of like what the Divi and the Elementor aim to give people the ability to do. And breakdance, same thing, breakdance, same thing. It’s like, all right, you don’t need to know all the stuff.

You don’t need to know all the things. You just need to be able to get from point A to point B and the quality doesn’t really matter. As long as it looks okay, you’re good to go and then you can start selling to anybody and everybody and I don’t know that if you want to see the industry race to the bottom if you want to see prices decline if you want to see respect of developers and designers and you know respect for the work that we do go you know completely in the dumpster then that’s that’s the path. We should all take and unfortunately You know Elementor’s got a gazillion users and Divi has a gazillion users And that’s that’s the path that we are currently on and it’s not a win for anybody going down that path is not going to elevate Anybody it’s not going to help us make more money.

It’s not going to value our services It’s not going to do anything for anybody But it is going to make people that don’t know what they’re doing a little bit of money in the short term because you know they can they can sell websites and they can slap them together and it is what it is that’s the that’s the path we’re on that’s why I talk about things like standards and best practices and elevating your game and being more valuable to your clients and raising prices on and on and on and on and on so I talk about all this stuff because that helps all of us. The more people that buy into that across the industry, the more the industry actually goes up, right? We are on a path spiraling out of control towards the bottom and that’s not the path that I think any of us wants to be on. Alright, nice to have a WDD after the unveil of automatic tokens and frames for Figma.

Yes, yes, yes, okay All right, I’m just looking through some comments here Ruben says leave breakdance alone Okay Hey, I mean I said I said out of those it’s the best one right I gave it a compliment Why should we use WordPress combined with bricks over web flow for example? We are starting off with a little Q&A We’ll come back to Q&A we’re going to get into our main topics and we’ll come back to Q&A. But I’m just starting off with a little bit of Q&A. To get us warmed up, we got to get warmed up.

We got a bunch of people here, which is fantastic. So this is a great question. If the bricks and oxygen to the world did not exist, at this point, and let’s say WordPress blew up, I would probably go to Webflow. That’s probably what I would go to.

Oh, oh, oh, Framer. Let’s talk about Framer. Framer. Couple people have hit me up and said, hey, you gotta do something on Framer.

And here’s why I gotta do something on Framer. Gotta do a video on Framer because every creator that I am subscribed to, and I subscribe to a lot of creators, and not just in the WordPress community, but like designers and, you know, a bunch of just to see what’s going on, what’s being talked about, what’s being discussed. You know, I always think it’s funny like every everything that comes out is like the next greatest thing and the you know the end of something else and it’s like the headlines of these articles and the fucking faces they make like and all and all the screenshots and shit I can’t take it I can’t take half that shit but I do I do watch a lot of creators and I will say that I think I think it’s hilarious that they’re all like all up on Framer. Like, Framer’s the next greatest thing.

Okay, I opened Framer. Three minutes, wanted to jump off of a bridge face first, looked at the DOM, horrific, absolute nightmare, worst I’ve ever seen. And, you know, it’s funny because I, you know, I actually put on the comment to one of the Framer’s videos, like, you know, this is a great idea. Like, it’s a great concept.

Unfortunately, the DOM is a nightmare, and the DOM’s always gonna be a nightmare with a tool like that. We can talk about why in the official Framer video. But the first person to reply to me goes, what’s a DOM, right? And that’s just, you know, that’s the community.

That’s the community that they market to. Nobody knows. Anybody using Framer has no idea what they’re doing. But I love the creators who are all like, you know, they’re supposed to be professionals or whatever, and they’re like, oh, Framer’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and look at this AI thing that it does, and it’s gonna assemble pages for you, and it’s a great starting point,

7 0:18:32 da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. 1

0:18:33 Every compliment imaginable, and then I wonder why, and I’m like, oh, they have a 50% revenue share affiliate program. That’s why. So, like, half these channels, it’s, you’re getting the thoughts of, not a professional creator, necessarily, you’re getting the thoughts of an affiliate grabber, right?

Like a commission, a commission chaser. And I just, I just feel like that’s got to be, that’s got to be, because there’s no rationality for saying that Framer is a great new tool and it’s going to change the game and on and on and on, because it has tremendous, like, fundamental flaws. So it just has to be the fact that they can just make a bunch of commissions on people that, again, don’t know what they’re doing, don’t know what to look for, don’t know why it sucks, but you know, they can sell it. They can sell it and a lot of people are gonna buy it and they’re gonna get that 50% commission.

You know, it’s just, woo, yeah. It’s a generous affiliate program, as Andrew says, because you can also, it turns out, sell templates for Framer and then you get 50% of the, or actually I think you get the full amount of the price of the template. Like framer doesn’t even take a commission I don’t think. And then if the person converts to using framer you get 50% of the monthly revenue.

I don’t know, it’s just, it’s a money grab in my opinion. But I don’t wanna just say that without any evidence. I’m going to make a video demonstrating why framer is a dumpster fire. It’s a dumpster fire from a workflow perspective, it’s a dumpster fire from maintainability and scalability, surely a dumpster fire from accessibility.

I mean, we can pull up, well I’ll do it in the video, I’ll pull up Framer’s own website. We can look at the accessibility of it, we can look at the performance of it, and then we can look at the DOM, and then we can just all agree, because this is like factual reality, we can just all agree that this is a dumpster fire and it will always be it’s not a fixable situation because of the way framers built and the the the people that framers being marketed to the type of person you what I’m getting at is if you want to be a professional web designer you have to actually know web design okay there’s no way around it everybody wants these shortcut you know tools it’s like you have to know what you’re doing like in any industry there’s no tool that’s going to come in and just like magically now you know what you’re doing there’s a lot to know and a lot to learn and you have to put in the time as with anything else of any of any value so yeah Patrick says influencers are a plague yeah and that’s why I like to try to make it a point over and over and over again. Do you notice there’s no, I get endless requests for, will you sponsor our this? Will you sponsor our that?

Will you do a video on this? And here’s, you can get your affiliate commissions. I have affiliate links. They’re for products that I actually use in my Blueprint website on every single thing.

That’s it. I don’t like have any pet things that I sell. I don’t have any, like, just, oh, somebody hit me up and they wanted me to do a video on their thing and I can make some quick affiliate commissions on it. There’s none of that content on the channel.

There’s no ads on the channel, other than whatever default YouTube ads show. It’s just, that’s it, it’s just content, that’s what it is. And it’s, I say things that actually make me less money half the time. Because it doesn’t matter.

Like what’s more important is to not be in the cult of influence, where it’s like every video has to have a stupid face and it has to say that this is the next greatest thing and you should definitely buy it using my affiliate link. And that kind of, it’s just, it’s another, another race to the fucking bottom. That’s what that is. Okay, let’s get on to our actual programming for today.

So, automatic tokens and frames for Figma was announced yesterday. If you haven’t watched the video, go watch that video after this stream, of course. We’re gonna be doing a few more teasers, and we have to do some stuff talking about the workflow, because what I’m gleaning from a few of the comments is there’s a lot of people who don’t understand how Figma would fit into the workflow. And this is a natural thing.

If you’ve never used Figma or you’ve never made it, you know what it is and maybe you know even kind of how to use it, but you’ve never found a way to really incorporate it into your workflow. I’m not saying that every single person should incorporate Figma into their workflow. And this is especially difficult for people to grasp because of how fast the workflow is when you just add frames into Bricks and then you start designing. But there are really good reasons to use Figma as part of your workflow.

If you’re a solo person, if you fly solo and do every step of the process yourself, and that’s all you ever want to do, like you always just want to be a freelancer and you have no aspirations to get bigger and better or bring on any help or anything like that, then you might be just good with adding frames into Bricks and styling those frames and working from there. There’s still a little bit of inefficiency in that, but if you ever want to get bigger, if you ever want to incorporate other people into your process then I’m going to make the case that Figma is a must for that process and if you want to work with bigger clients also who have multiple decision makers because anytime there’s multiple people that have to approve something or have input on something Figma is far more efficient for dealing with that kind of client so there’s a few different reasons. I’m going to probably make a video focusing intently on where Figma is in a professional workflow and why it should exist, okay? Because I think there’s a little bit of confusion there.

But anybody that uses Figma already kind of already understands all of this and they’re just really stoked about automatic tokens for Figma and frames for Figma. But go watch the video, there’s more teasers to come. And then of course the release will be in July. Let’s hop over to Elementor and let’s start talking about these three outrageous Elementor workflow features.

And this is not just to harp on Elementor and it’s not just a harp on Elementor creators. There’s some good just fundamentals here that everybody should know and then then you’ll I think you’ll know why it’s so outrageous and baffling that Elementor does things this way. Let me go ahead and share my screen and let’s make sure that we’re screen-sharing and let’s go ahead and find our Elementor install. Okay so let’s go ahead and hop in it opened the browser in the wrong window.

So I’m gonna bring it over here All right, and let’s make sure that we’re good to go. Oh, we’re zoomed in a little bit. Let’s zoom out. Okay Great let’s go to pages.

Let’s go edit with Elementor Okay, this is fun. Aren’t we having fun here in Elementor? It’s a beautiful little UI All right. So what I’m gonna do because there’s no section element in Elementor, which is also outrageous, but I’ve already talked about that before I’m gonna drag in a container here and The first thing that we’re going to talk about is what Elementor asks me to do Regarding the height of this container or the size of this container I’m gonna I’m gonna add a heading.

Let’s add a heading here hat right here. Okay, good. So we’ll just say section heading. Now I want you to notice right off the bat, there’s no vertical or what’s called block padding in this section, right?

And I looked around for a good way to add this. And I think what Elementor users and experts would have you do probably is come up to, I think it’s in site settings, and then you go into layout, and right here, container padding, which you see is all zeroed out right now. Now we’ve already talked about proper section styling and how you do not want to put padding in the inner container of a section because it changes your effective website width. And then you can’t reference your website width properly, and there’s just a lot of problems with it.

And that’s exactly what this setting is going to do. So I’m just going to use, and I also don’t want to use pixels, right? So I want to use, ideally, you know, a clamp function would be good here, but I can use an M or something like that. And I’m going to put in eight, eight M.

Why is it forcing me to put O eight? Okay, now I can delete the eight. All right. So eight M and then I’m going to put eight M here and it would also help if we put now, can I get rid of the right padding?

No, no. It forces me guys. It force forces. This is outrageous.

It forces me to have zero as a value. That’s really, really bad. Like really, really bad I’m gonna leave this here we’re gonna hit update I’m gonna go back and we’re gonna put a background color on this section now because it would help to be able to see it right can I look I’m clicking on the container I don’t know how people work with this piece of shit I swear I do not know how people work in this builder all right I’m gonna click on container now I can now I can do it let’s go ahead and style it. So we’re going to add a background color.

We’re going to go background type classic. I don’t know what is going on. Color. All right just give me a swatch.

Here we go. Okay that’s that’s enough there. Why is the heading blue? I don’t know.

I didn’t ask for this. Can we just make it black like it’s supposed to be? All right let’s update. Now you can see this is what I’m trying to achieve.

You want white space, breathing room in your section, right? Which by the way, this isn’t even a section. It’s a container. It’s only a section when I go down here to advanced and then where even is it?

Layout, additional options, HTML tag section. Now it’s a section. Finally. Okay.

So I I’m looking for white space in here and so I just showed you one way that we can do it, but it’s applied it improperly. It’s applied it to the inner container of this section, which we don’t want to do. And if you have that off by default, which I’ve seen a bunch of creators, because I’ve watched videos, like how do people manage this in Elementor? How do people deal with this in Elementor?

And I see a lot will keep this setting off. So I’m going to go back here to layout and we’re going to take this away. All right and I’m going to and by the way I can’t I’m not allowed to have no value. You have to have zero and if you know anything about web design no value and zero are two very very very very different things.

The fact that it does not allow you to have no value here is outrageous, that’s outrageous. Okay, let’s go back. So let’s get on to what I actually wanted to demonstrate. So I can’t put padding, let me go to advanced here, because I could also do it on a one-off section, right?

So I think this affects the outer wrapper. So I could try to go 8M here. It’s on pixels now I go to M and it clears my values then it automatically puts them on all sides. Okay and then right and then left.

Okay that I could do this I could do this and I think this is fine but I can’t do this. I can’t do this. Why? Because in this input it also forces me to have zero and you know what’s going to happen when you have zero left and right on your section padding well We’re going to see a problem on the front end which I don’t even know how to get to We’re going to go let’s go preview changes here you go So let’s inspect because I’m forced to have zero as my left and right values.

This is what you’re going to end up with Which we which we don’t want right now I could put in side values, but putting in side values on a section by section by section basis, I mean, this is the life of a chump. This is absolute chump-like behavior to try to manage this on a section by section basis. But this is even the most outrageous thing. This is not, I’m just gonna clear all this out.

Let’s go back. I think you have to go to pixels to get it to go to nothing. See, if it’s on Ms, well, it starts out. But once you put in a value, dog, you are locked in, you cannot get rid of that value unless you just switch to a different unit that’ll clear the values out doesn’t make any sense but it is what it is okay that’s not even the most outrageous this is the most outrageous so the default for like hey here’s your section you don’t like the height of that section guys what is the first control that it gives you right here This is how Elementor wants you to deal with the amount of white space that is in your sections.

Which in itself is outrageous. And I’m going to show you why this is outrageous. So I’m going to put this at, let’s just choose a number like 500. And let’s ignore the fact that I’m working in pixels right here.

This is what they want you to do. They want you to now justify the content. So I’m gonna justify the content to the sender. Now anybody that’s watched Page Building 101, you already probably know what’s gonna happen.

And I wanna just test you in your mind. You should already know. When you, and this is why I can open a builder and just go, nope, unsubscribe. Like, I see what they’re asking me to do and I already know the pitfalls of that and why that’s not the best way to go.

And I’m just, then I just question the whole thing. I’m like, why are you asking me to do that? Why is this, why is this the default control for what’s going on with my sections right here? So let’s illustrate why this is a bad thing.

So the other thing that we try to, I don’t even like 500, that’s too much. Let’s do 300. Okay, that’s something decent. Okay, now, rhythm.

Okay, I add another section. decent okay now Rhythm okay, I add another section, so let’s go. Let’s go add another section. I’m gonna go up here There is no such thing as a section, so I’m just gonna drag in another container.

Okay. Here’s my here’s my next section right here Let’s choose a new background color so that we can see these against each other So let’s go in here, and let’s choose like this and just bring this down. I don’t know. I just want a different color We’re just trying to make sure everybody can see what we’re talking about.

All right, I’m gonna go up here and add a heading. And this is gonna be section two, right? Okay, so now I’m asked more or less to do the exact same thing. So if I want the exact same spacing here for proper balance and rhythm, okay, you’re gonna see what I’m getting at in just a second.

So where do I wanna go? Oh, I wanna select my container, don’t I? I’m clicking on the container right now. It’s not selecting the container.

I’m going to go select the container from over here. And then I’m going to go back to layout and I’m going to do the exact same thing because that’s what it’s asking me to do. So I’m going to go 300 and then I’m going to justify the content of the center. Now, do you see that these two sections are more or less equal?

Okay. This is giving us proper balance and rhythm in our spacing. That’s not to say that you never want less spacing, right? Very often you might want a situation where this section, maybe there’s just like feature cards in here or something like testimonial cards.

And that’s really the only purpose of this section. So you don’t want it to have the normal section white space. I’m just going to call it white space right now. It could be padding, it could be whatever.

In this case it’s not using padding so we can’t call it that. We just have to call it whitespace. So this has like a default whitespace. This has like half of that default.

But it’s still rhythm and it’s still balance and things like that. But the fact that we’re using minimum height to accomplish this, number one I have to remember what all these values are, but actually remembering what all these values are doesn’t matter at all. It doesn’t even help you to remember what your values are because this is fake white space fake white space does anybody know a minimum height minimum height works versus something like padding padding is physical white space there’s no way to put content inside of padding you can’t do it the padding forces the content away that’s what padding does it is physical space. This with minimum height, what you’re seeing here, this white space is virtual space.

It’s fake space. It’s not, there’s nothing real here. And so I can prove that to you by just duplicating the heading a bunch of times. So how do I even duplicate?

Just Command D, okay. Command D, where is my white space now? Where is it? It was never there to begin with.

It only appeared that there was white space, but there wasn’t any actual physical space there. See, if I put padding in a section, like I’m supposed to, I will always have the same amount of white space, and I can decrease the padding to decrease the white space. I can increase the padding to increase the white space, but the content that I put in the container will never impact that amount of white space. The white space has been declared in existence by the padding.

When you use minimum height you actually haven’t declared any white space at all. My content will continue to just it’ll just touch the edges of the section at some point. So when an element or user and I watch the creators do this when the content starts encroaching on the white space, they just go add more minimum height. But now you have a value here that hasn’t been used anywhere else.

This value is unique to the content that is in this one individual section, which means there is no consistency in the white space across any given section, across any part of your website. It’s all magic numbers. These are what we call in development magic numbers. There’s no reason for it other than well this had this amount of content so I had to do this to make it have some white space.

This is the workflow that they ask you to use. This is an outrageous workflow. Why do all of this dance? See the more content I add to the section I have to keep dancing.

I have to go back here and I got to dance more, right, with this setting over here. If I just use top and bottom block padding, you would never have to worry about the amount of content that’s in this section. You would always have the exact same amount of white space. So the fact that this is what Elementor is asking users to do by default, I just find this to be outrageous.

So put this in the comments. Are you seeing the clear difference? Let me just illustrate. Let’s go here.

Let’s go bricks, okay, right here. Let’s just illustrate this. Because this is one of those things where there’s no subjective opinion here. There’s no like, oh, well, you do it this way, I’ll do it that way.

I mean, if you want it, what it comes down to is, do you want to dance? How much do you want to dance when you’re building the websites, right? Like a fool. I’m not saying you’re dancing like really well.

I’m saying like you look like a fool. Like you’re the only person dancing and you might be drunk. That’s what we all think, okay? That’s the kind of situation that we have here.

So we’re gonna go here and let’s just add a new page. Let’s say blank, okay? Let’s publish this. Let’s edit with Bricks.

And let’s just add a section to the page and let’s add a heading. So I’m gonna add the section and I’m gonna add a heading Now first of all, what you’re gonna notice is I already have declared my white space here, right? I’ve already declared what my section padding is and here’s my heading right here Let’s calm this down over here and let’s just start adding multiple headings. Well, let’s give it a background color first So let’s just do let’s do like base ultra light Okay, that should be enough for you guys to see some structure here of the section.

So now I’m going to grab the heading and I’m just going to start duplicating the heading. Look at what my white space is doing. Basically this format of how a section is behaving is saying, hey dog, I know you want this amount of white space. I don’t really care how much content you put in here.

I’m still going to give you that amount of white space. And that’s going to be the rhythm across your entire website. And then you can easily reduce the padding or increase the padding. We can do that with utility classes, you can do that at the ID level if you really, really want to.

You could do that with tokens, with variables, you can do this any number of ways. Custom classes, BIM, full control. You’re in full control of the amount of white space and the rhythm. And when you tokenize this and you have like a extra small, small, medium, large, and maybe they all follow a mathematical ratio because we can create some semblance of rhythm and balance and organization in our workflow.

It just all works out really, really, really well. And it’s easy and you don’t have to dance with it. You should never like the minimum height thing has a very limited amount of use cases. I’m not saying you should never use minimum height ever what I’m saying is the idea that minimum height should be the first control point that users are given and Encouraged to work with that control point over Proper padding in a section is that’s the part that’s outrageous.

That’s the part that’s outrageous so Yeah, you if I I don’t let’s let’s go to the chat I got it. I got to see I got to see how people are chiming in on this Diana says I’ve been a developer for 23 years and all these make my brain bleed the massive divs non-semantic markup and so on yes, okay Okay, brother if you keep trashing Elementor, you’re going to need a higher personal security Elementor user here. It’s a non-issue Elementor does things on an ID level What’s a non-issue? Yes, I already found these, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, okay.

Already, okay. Why don’t you use padding and Elementor instead of minimum height? Well, I would, but they don’t allow you to do it properly. That’s what I was demonstrating.

So I’m gonna go back here. That’s a mess. Let’s just delete the mess, okay. So here’s my heading right here, all right, my heading.

And what I would like to do, I mean, I thought I made this clear, right? So I don’t want a minimum height, okay? So can I clear that out? Thank you, all right.

At least you can clear out something around here. All right, so I wanna use padding, right? So something else that’s outrageous, padding and margin are not advanced, okay? That would be like basic, like can we put that under the style tab maybe?

Like why is that considered advanced? But let me just demonstrate. Okay, you want me to use top and bottom padding, right? Great, so let’s just do four.

Oh God, okay. All right, let’s go, take it away from the right, take it away from the left. Okay, there’s my top and bottom four. There you go, I got it, right?

But I can’t, I’m not allowed to use padding properly. Elementor does not allow it forces you to put zero left and right and I showed you what happens when you do that your content is going to touch the edge of the screen. You’re now forced to put in a gutter like two. Okay so dude what is going on?

Stop it. It will not it will not let me just put a two. Okay update here now I have a 2M gap on the side but to do this at every section manually no never never never should I ever have to do that and then if I want to put this into the global styles I could potentially do that but again I showed you some issues with that there you also can’t mix units right so if I want to use maybe clamps for the top and the bottom and Ms for left and right, that’s not possible. You can’t mix and match units.

I don’t think, unless you can do this pencil thing. The minute I put in something here, it just zeroed all these out. And I can’t remove it. 3

0:43:28 Guys, this is outrageous. 1 0:43:30

This is insane. This is insanity. I go into bricks, okay? Do you think bricks is going to do that to me?

So I go to layout I’m gonna go to padding. Okay, it’s showing me what the defaults are equaling to right now if I want to put You know, let’s say 8m here 6m and I want to put 5 pixels like you would never do this But the the fact is that I can do it if I want to because bricks doesn’t assume that I’m a moron, right? So I can do 15 rim over here, and I can do auto down here. I can do anything that I want.

Anything that I want, there is no limitation. In Elementor, not only can I not do anything I want, I’m forced to use zero values instead of no value at all, which is an absolute atrocity. This is just, I just don’t understand how, how, how, how does this builder have so many users? Let me answer it, let me answer it.

So the answer should be obvious now, they don’t know what they’re doing. And they don’t know how the builder should behave. And so they put up with this stuff, and they work around it, because they just don’t know, they just don’t know, they don’t know. And it, you know, they have a bunch of pre-made elements that they can drag and drop, and that kind of gets them to where they want to go.

But the idea of a professional creator, like really buying into this builder and really encouraging people to use it, I mean this is like, man. There are problems with page width too. See, Pat says the workflow of Elementor is really bad, I’d not use it. Yes, I agree with you, but why are there millions of people going, it’s amazing, it’s the best thing ever, it’s so easy, I can’t do anything, I can’t even get started in Elementor.

I can’t even get started. Because they take the language of web design and they mangle it and then they say, we’ll just learn how to do it in element learn the element or way I don’t want to learn the elements or way I already know the web design way see the reason why bricks is so great and so powerful is because if you know web design you can just start working because it all respects the actual principles of web design element or like I said mangles the principles of web design I just demonstrated with min height as the main control for your sections The idea that that’s the main control that is a mangled approach to to web design which has clear downsides that I can actually demonstrate So the next thing is it encourages so there was this is the second thing that was only one of the things So if I if I have this heading right here, for example, and I want to change its width. Like maybe I want it to be, I want these headings to be 40 characters wide, which is, you know, a good thing to do often. Well, you would come down to width right here.

And so, you know, default, I don’t even know what this is. This is, again, this is the language of Elementor. There’s no value in CSS called default, okay? There’s no, that’s not a value.

Uh, they’re 100 is a value. Okay, I can understand that width inline auto Okay, auto is a value. I guess that’s what that’s just doing auto. I don’t know what the word inline is for there.

Um, The the fact that we’re talking about width that’s already inline, uh, but then I can do custom Okay, so let’s do custom and let’s try to do the character thing. So i’ve got to choose the pencil and I can do 50 characters, right? Now let’s talk about width versus max width because this is one where even bricks. So if we’re going to criticize, let’s criticize equally, right?

Bricks and all builders, this has to come from the idea that users don’t know what they’re doing. There’s no other explanation for it. If you know web design, you know that if you want to put a width on something, you should almost always put a max width on that element, not an actual width. Why?

Well, you should already know. If you put a physical width on it, you just say width, and you say a thousand pixels. Any screen size under a thousand, it’s going to cause an overflow. You’re going to break your page.

Page broken. Okay, congratulations. Shouldn’t have used width. If you put a max width of a thousand pixels, it’s saying, hey, you can, you have to, like the maximum amount you can be is a thousand.

But if something forces you to get smaller, go ahead and get smaller because we don’t want to break things. That’s what max width does. So 99% of the time you’re setting a width on something, you use max width and then you move on with your life and everything is good. But these builders, you know what they said?

They said, users don’t know that they’re supposed to do max width. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna give them this width control because they know what a width is, like, you know, width, measure, ruler, yeah, we all know what width is, right? So we’re gonna let them set a width, but in order to protect them on the back end, we are going to set a max width of 100%. This is a backwards approach to setting.

This is mangling the intent of these controls. Why? Because of the fear that users don’t know what they’re doing, and we have to protect them from themselves. So we have to give them a label that they’re more likely to understand, which is just width, and then we have to protect them on the back end with the max width of 100%.

This causes a lot of problems, okay? But it does solve the problem of people not knowing what they’re doing and creating overflows. But with 50 characters, I just wanted to point that out. This should be a max width field right here.

That’s what this should be, max width field. And you should give the user both fields, because width is sometimes valuable. So they need to have control of both, but you don’t, you don’t in Elementor. There’s no, there’s no max width.

Now, if we go to Bricks, look right here, width. I don’t want this to be the first one. Okay, so if I’m nitpicking, this should not be first. Max width should be the first option because that’s the primarily used option.

And then give me a width control down here. But at least I have both of them. At least I do have both of them. In Elementor, you know, who needs max width who needs that yeah just use your width that’s kind of the approach but anyway what was I encouraged to use that’s kind of the question when I click custom I was encouraged to use percent that was the default that it that’s what it gave me out of the box this is the worst this is the worst of all units of every unit maybe besides VW You know very limited use cases for this you got to really know what you’re doing if you go with the VW route But percentage out of all this available to me like characters rims m’s With percentage is the worst one and especially in a width field and this is where you see it right you know this You know, this percentage here, because of what’s gonna happen on different, this is forcing you now to go through and reset the width at smaller devices.

Because that’s 50% on desktop may look fantastic, on a tiny mobile device, 50% is gonna be a disaster. An absolute disaster. So, yeah, that’s, the fact that it defaults to percentage there, that was another thing. The fact that it doesn’t give you max width.

I mean, these are, if you’re a web designer, you live by these controls, right? And Elementor is just completely mangling this entire approach. But this is not the worst of all. The worst, the most egregious error is the one next.

And this, I was just, I turned it off. I was watching the creator, I alluded to them earlier. They have a hundred thousand something followers and they’re showing how to build a page in Elementor And here I am sitting just drinking my coffee. Mm-hmm like the frog and and This is what I saw.

So I’m going to add a container and Okay, I also can’t is it designed like this that you have to drag something in Like I have to physically grab it and drag it is that is that how elementor is designed to work all right so we’re gonna put in a heading here and we’re gonna say my section right and then we’ll do the stupid min width thing okay so let’s let’s go because that’s what they want you to do right they want you to go here they want you to do this and then a line by the way how many things that I just have to do I had to do min width then I had to do another control to get it to the center, which if I just used even top and bottom padding, it would have been in the vertical center by default. Like I would not have had to set another control. So just from an efficiency standpoint of like, okay, add that and then add this. And it’s still not a section by the way, because I didn’t change the tags.

You have to do that manually as well. But now watch this, I have a section, let’s add an image, how about that? So we’re gonna add an image all right got a drag it and then oh okay my white space is gone because I added a bigger element and now now I have no white space where I had some earlier so let’s let’s go dance with the min height here so we got to get ourselves a little bit more min height do a little dance does that look good guys does that is that about is that about the amount that we need? Okay.

Well, you know, don’t get too attached to it because it’s about to go away. All right, we’re going to go full on our image because we want. . .

Oh, there goes our white space. Okay, let’s go dance again. Let’s go back here. Got to dance a little bit more.

Give us a little bit more white space there. Are you guys okay with that white space? Oh, don’t get too attached to it because it’s about to go away. Okay, we’re going to go with a button now.

So let’s add a button. All right, there we are. Hey, there’s a little bit of a gap here. Where’s that coming from?

I didn’t ask for that. Did anybody see me ask for spacing between these elements? I want to see elements or things you’re dumb. And they’re like, well, we’ll just give them a little space because they probably don’t know how to space things out.

All right, so let’s go look at this on the front end. Let’s even see, let’s see where this is coming from. Okay, there, let’s open this and that. Oh, that’s interesting.

All right, I don’t even see. Let’s open this, that. Something’s gotta have a margin on it. Oh my dear gosh.

They’re putting inline style blocks in a simple heading element. This is just an absolute atrocity. Okay, yep, yep, don’t know. Okay, there must be a gap on the section then.

There it is, right there. Okay, where’s that gap set? I don’t know, probably in some global setting somewhere. Okay, I didn’t ask for it, I don’t know where it’s coming from.

That’s the problem. Like if I had asked for it and set it somewhere, then I would at least know where to go change it. But now I got to hunt around in the things. I’m not even gonna worry about it right now.

Let’s say that you wanted this button to be spaced out more from this image. I kid you not. I am not lying to you right now. I’m not embellishing.

This creator with a hundred thousand something followers was telling people to do this. To go up here and type the word spacer and drag this spacer element in and then hit update and then go. And now guys you have space. Okay, if you don’t already know, this is like, what would be a good example of this?

Like, I can’t even think of a metaphor, but the absolute chump-like nonsense that this is, adding physical spacer, Alan, what is this, fucking Squarespace? Squarespace has you do this too, by the way. This is an atrocity in web design, an absolute atrocity. I need you now to think forwards to an entire website where there’s just spacer elements everywhere.

And by the way, let’s go in and see, are there any settings for this spacer element? Well yes there are. You can set this in pixels, you can set it in VH units you can but that only affects this one spacer so if you’re using these spacers to space your content out on An untold amount of pages across the website and then you decide at some point like you know I need to tighten up all my spacing a little bit. It’s a little too loose with the spacing I Mean what life are you gonna live now?

You’ve got to go find every spacer element that was added to these pages and manually adjust the value. But Kevin, maybe we can tokenize it. Maybe we can have a spacing variable. We can drop that into the spacers.

I mean, aside from what it’s doing to the DOM, right, you’re just adding DOM element after DOM element, which it’s not even probably one DOM element. I mean, knowing Elementor, let’s go, let’s go investigate. How many DOM elements is this thing adding? Let’s go to the front end.

Let’s go inspect. Okay, let’s go in here. All right, there’s one DOM element, right? Holy, are you serious?

No, sir, no, sir. This, wait, I didn’t even know it was this bad. I didn’t even know it was this bad. Hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up.

We got one, we got one. Let me collapse this. There’s our parent spacer element. You see it right here, spacer.

default. Okay, that’s, what’s this? Okay, all right, I opened it again. All right, so I’m gonna open it up.

There’s a second DOM element. Okay, there’s an inline style block. Wow, and then there’s another DOM element, and then another DOM element. Guys, it took one, two, three, four, five elements to make a space between margin would have done this gap would have done this padding would have done this you shouldn’t use padding for that but padding would have done it.

Shit, I’d almost argue the padding is better than this. Oh, yeah, no, for sure. padding padding would be better than this. I mean, it would be an atrocity to use padding for this.

But this is even more of an atrocity. But go back to the fact that you can’t, you now have all these spacer elements all across your website that you have no control over. There is no way, it doesn’t allow any other unit, so you can’t put a variable here for all your spacing. Anybody that does this, and the fact that there’s a creator teaching this, they’re teaching people to do it this way.

This is maximum prison. This is the death penalty. You got to go. You got to go.

I’m being facetious. OK, I’m just OK, guys. It’s a joke. It’s a joke.

OK, we talk all the time about felonies and misdemeanors and prison time and rehabilitation. Get with the program. OK, this is insanity. This is insanity.

I got to I got to I got to run back to the chat because I didn’t even know honestly that it was that bad. I didn’t even know that it was that bad. So let’s let’s see. Yeah.

But okay, but tell me, let’s go back to the main topic. Why does this, why does Elementor have what millions of users again? Somebody, and make it make sense. Somebody make it make sense.

Elementor spacers are used for background gradient colors. Elementor does not advocate for using spacers as spacing elements. Well, that alone, that alone, just stop it, stop it, stop it. I just said, make it make sense.

You just gave this explanation. Let’s read it slowly for everybody. Elementor spacers are used for background gradient colors, Elementor does not advocate for using spacers as spacing elements. Come again?

Come again. Don’t, this is not, I’m not accepting this as an explanation. Ok, number one. Not, not, not accepting that as an, you’re not going to gaslight me.

Ok? I am not gaslightable. That, that’s a, that’s a gas light attempt right there okay now let’s just set that aside for a second element or spacers are used for background gradient colors what does that mean you don’t need an a spacing element for space you don’t need a spacing element for background gradients you don’t need There is no Use you cannot give me there isn’t one. I’ve been doing this a very long time I Will give you what like I’ll give you an automatic CSS LTD.

I’ll give you a frames LTD I’ll give you everything everything that I can give you if you can find one Practical use for a physical spacer element one just give me one that I couldn’t do it’s got to be something where I couldn’t achieve that same thing with a better way and I’ll tell you right now like pseudo elements all day long way better than that but again element or you’ve got it go back to the philosophy that I continue repeating and harping on because I want you to desperately understand this they think you’re doing. That is the philosophy of these builders. Oxygen and Bricks respect the user. They say no we are going to give the user a web design workflow.

Elementor and Divi and all of these other breakdance, the underlying philosophy is that you don’t know what you’re doing That is the you can’t escape that you cannot escape that So if you want to use element or as a professional you have to get okay with the fact that you’re using a tool That believes you don’t know what you’re doing That is the full that is why all of this exists the way that it exists. I Personally would never buy into that philosophy, right? I would never use a tool that thinks that about me. And I also know that it’s just gonna get worse and worse and worse, because they’re gonna continue racing to the bottom, finding more and more people that don’t know what they’re doing and trying to make it easier and easier and easier for them.

And it’s gonna get worse and worse and worse for the professional that’s trying to use the tool, right? So, but this is, I mean, when we say outrageous, this is as outrageous as it can possibly get. The idea of using physical space or L for anything, for anything, you can’t give me a real reason why you would use an element like this. And again, it’s, you know, if you need a blank box, like, can we just add a fucking div to the page and use that as your blank box and do whatever you want with it, right?

There’s no reason for this spacer with no controls then I go over here I mean okay I can do a bunch of this stuff with it but again it’s it’s the plagued by the same problems that we’ve seen with all the other controls in Elementor so there’s so many limitations built in it’s five DOM elements five what okay let’s go let’s go compare compare and contrast let’s get here’s a section let’s just say I need a blank box for whatever reason. Just give, Bricks, can you give me a blank box? Okay, there’s a blank box right there. Let’s drop it into our section.

All right, let’s drop it into our section. Thank you, save. There’s my blank box right there. Now let’s go look at the blank box on the front end.

Like what was required to accomplish a blank box on a page? There’s my blank box right there. Guys, it’s one DOM element. It’s a div and there’s nothing inside of it and there’s no children and there’s no style blocks and there’s no nothing else.

It’s just, hey, you asked for a box, I gave you a box. What else, what more do you want from me, right? And now I can go do whatever I want to that box. Anything imaginable, I can do to that box.

So this is, again, compare and contrast. Why? Because Bricks doesn’t think you’re a moron and Elementor does. Elementor thinks you’re a moron.

And I guess I can’t see how that tool can be recommended by any sort of leader or professional or creator of any kind. And then as a user, why would you want to use a tool that thinks about you this way? Okay, the underlying philosophy is to generate as much revenue on the ignorance of customers. Yeah, I mean, well, it’s not, it’s not really like that.

We just want as many people as possible to be able to use our tool and we want anybody to be, we want to empower anybody to build a website. Which by the way, I’ve said this time and time again, if you’re building like, you know, your grandma’s bunco website and you want to use Elementor and that’s the only website you ever intend on building and you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re just like, hey, let’s just make it as easy as possible. Well, one, I don’t know, why are you on WordPress to begin with? Go to Wix, go to Squarespace, whatever.

Get it done there, get it done there. What I am, the people I’m talking to are so-called professionals and so-called leaders or so-called experts or so-called this and so-called that. I say so-called because this is major red flags, major red flags if you’re going to recommend this kind of trash, right, to your user base, to your viewers and things like that. I mean, this is, you should be steering them away from the trash cans of the world.

But hey guys, there’s affiliate commissions to be made, okay? Does Elementor have a Elementor affiliate? I mean, surely, right? It can’t be that big without an affiliate program.

Yeah, of course, right? Of course. Yeah, look at this. Juicy, juicy, juicy.

So you know what? I can pay my bills. It doesn’t matter what trash can you guys are using, but cash, I can cash the checks at my bank, right? I think that’s kind of the, is that why they do it?

I’m not gonna accuse them of doing it for that reason, but is that why they do it? Because you know what, BRICS, guys, I mean, put your money where your mouth is, right? BRICS does not have an affiliate program. Oxygen does not have an affiliate program.

I’ve been creating hundreds of hours of content around two builders that don’t have an affiliate program. Why? Because I can’t in good conscience recommend any of the ones that do. That’s just how it is.

Sucks for me, but that’s the life you have to live. Like if you want any sort of like I mean you got to look at yourself in the mirror when you wake up in the morning I assume so this idea and the same thing is happening with Framer that’s why every creator is like Framer this, Framer that, Framer this, Framer that, it’s great use it blah blah blah it’s going to change the game. It’s affiliate commissions. You cannot know what you’re doing and simultaneously believe that Framer is a good tool that people should be using.

You can’t know what you are doing and simultaneously believe that Elementor is a good tool that people should be using. Those two things cannot. You know I was nice, I’ve been nice like you know up to this point like live and let live whatever. I’m just gonna say it.

You can’t know what you are doing and recommend Elementor as a tool that people should be using. Those two things do not go together. They can’t go together. So there has to be another explanation.

You either don’t know what you’re doing or you like the affiliate commissions. That’s what I’m going with. Right? And so I think that’s, I mean, give me another reason.

Give me another reason. Make it make sense. I say this time and time again. Make it make sense.

Okay. We got to move on from the, that was the three outrageous Elementor workflow features. Let’s get on to Gutenberg. Found the two little nice nuggets in Gutenberg.

So you know, I’m doing some stuff to work with Elementor and this will be a good time. I’ll show you my notes. Okay. Ross says Divi’s working on a huge overhaul, but I doubt it will be following these principles.

No, it’s not gonna follow the principles. They will never follow the principles until they change their philosophy. These tools are based on a specific way of thinking. And the way of thinking is users are idiots and we have to work around the idiocy of the user.

And so they do things a specific way to work around that, right? The philosophy is not let’s give people who know what they’re doing a really fantastic tool that allows them to do things that they want to do and makes their life easier. There are ways to use a page builder to improve page building workflow, to improve web design workflow without mangling the philosophy of web design. Bricks is doing that.

Oxygen has done that. They could still get better. There are still many, many, many improvements that can be made. But at least their philosophy is, we have a real tool for real users who know what they’re doing.

Like that’s kind of the underlying philosophy, which is, that’s a good philosophy to live by in this game. But yeah, Gutenberg follows the same principle of, that’s why Gutenberg basically, the block editor, is a fucking Word document, right? There’s no semblance of web design, there’s no web design tools that you would normally see when you open Gutenberg why because they want to make it accessible to everybody oh you don’t know what you’re doing you can still use WordPress come on in here you here you go it’s a little block editor for you that’s not a professional tool it’s it wasn’t designed for professionals it’s not that’s why I resist it right so if you want to know why I resist it’s because it’s not made for me. It’s made for people who don’t know what they’re doing.

And it limits me because it was made for people that don’t know what they’re doing and specific decisions were made around that. It is inherently limiting to someone that does know what they’re doing. So again, resist. Okay, so I’m gonna bring up my notes for, let me go, I’m in Basecamp on my other screen here.

This is a good lesson for a few different reasons. We’re gonna go to Automatic CSS. Sorry, there’s lots of projects. Okay, we’re gonna go into here.

We’re gonna go into documentation. We’re gonna go into GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks. Okay, let’s bring this over. So I’m working on making Automatic CSS work with GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks.

Why? Because we introduced Gutenberg support, not for the native blocks, because those are trash cans. I am not, I refuse to do the work to make it work with the native blocks. It’ll work with the button element, that’s about it.

Cause I just know people are going to come in and start using button elements, and then they’re going to be like, why don’t ACSs work with the button element? And it, you know, it’s like, well, the button element is trash, but you know, we’re going to make it work just so that it, at least one thing works out of the box. We are going to bring you Automatic CSS or frames. I don’t know if they’ll be a part of a CSS or a part of frames our own blocks Okay, and then you can actually add clean blocks to the block editor And then everything will work flawlessly Obviously with automatic CSS and you’ll be able to build pages in the block editor if you hate your life and want to live that You know Live that life you’ll be able to do it, okay?

But this is this is what we have to do as a framework is we have to figure out How the builder or how the block system or whatever? approaches Web design from different perspectives and different angles right and then are they doing certain things correctly are they not doing certain things correctly? And then we have to put in workarounds. Okay, other frameworks don’t really do this.

Other frameworks just say, hey, it’s gonna work 90% out of the box, you deal with the other 10% of bullshit that doesn’t work. That’s on you, right? Where we actually go in and if we say, hey, we integrate with BRICS, it’s 100% integrated with BRICS. If we say we support oxygen, 100% integrated with oxygen.

We’ve done all the work to analyze how they output things, and then we put in the proper workaround. That’s what we do. We do all of this extra legwork. This is my notes from just a couple of hours of interacting with generate press and generate blocks and making it compatible with automatic CSS.

And so I’ll give you an example, right? So there’s sections. Sections are not set to display flex by default. Now as a user you have to know that they’re not set to display flex by default because if you try to use gap in them gap won’t work.

Gap doesn’t work on block elements and that’s what a section is by default in GeneratePress. So you’ll be using the gap field and it just won’t work. But if you know what you’re doing that’s okay because you’ll be like oh it’s not flex I can set it to flex. The problem is this is just a lot of extra work.

Now you set it to flex, and when you set it to flex column, your inner container shrinks. It’s no longer your website’s width, because it doesn’t have a width on it. It only has a max width, right? So you set the section to flex, and you guys should probably know that a flex parent manipulates how the children behave, okay, and so it causes another problem.

So what we have to do is we have to go in and we have to create these workarounds. Here’s another one. So adding, and this speaks to what didn’t work in Gutenberg that I found, that I discovered, which is, again, outrageous that this doesn’t work. Adding additional containers to sections does not automatically set them to the website’s content with, nor does it automatically center them.

So let me pull up Generate here, and I gotta pull up, this is gonna be hard, because I don’t know if the fixes are already in here. But let’s just see. So I’m gonna go to Pages, and this is just the, let’s go back to Crockford’s Law, right? That a tool is gonna do 90% of what you need it to do, and then you’re not gonna know what the 10% of the missing part is, or the headaches is, until you’re 90% of the way into the project.

That’s that’s like constant, right? Okay, so if I let’s go Remove this container. Let’s go remove this container. Let’s add a container All right.

I’m gonna add the container here. I have this option of adding an inner container Which is why did that why did that go away? Okay, there you go. So I added the inner container.

Let me can I have my structure panel back? So there’s the outer, there’s the inner. Now the problem with this is if I want another inner container, which happens often, I’m gonna show you in Bricks what I mean. So here’s my section in Bricks, right?

I’m gonna add a container. This is an inner container for that section. I can have as many of them as I want to, which is insanely helpful for grouping content that’s page width, okay? This is insanely helpful.

Can you do this in Oxygen? No. Can you do this in Elementor? No.

Can you do that? No, you can’t do it in any of them, okay? Because one, it relies on having a clean section, first of all, and not a hidden inner container that almost all of these builders have. Bricks has no hidden containers, right?

It only has containers you can actually see, feel, and touch, and smell if you wanted to, but that gets very awkward. But look, I can have as many as I want, right? So I’m gonna try to do that. I’m gonna try to replicate that and generate.

These are things where as a developer, here’s the thought process. I say, this is very helpful. Here’s a new system that I’m being asked to use. Can I do the same thing?

I use little tests. Like I have a whole list of like little tests that I run. Can I do X? Can I do Y?

Can I do Z? Why? Because these are very valuable things. So I’m going to go to add, and I’m going to add a container.

Well, this container, look, they’re both children. 3 1:16:10 Yeah?

1 1:16:12 Why is one child full width and the other child is page width? Or what we call content width.

Every, look in Bricks. Every child that I added in Bricks, what’s content width? 4 1:16:25

Right? 1 1:16:26 They’re all exactly the same.

There’s no difference between them, but there is a difference in Elementor. So what I was saying here is that this is a problem, right? It also, if you change their width, like let’s say you have a variable for your content width. So you come down here.

Now I like this. Look, they give you, I don’t want width to be first. I wish max width was first, but they give you both fields, right? And so let’s say that this, let’s say I have a variable, which I do.

Um, ooh, can’t use a variable in that field. Okay, so I can’t reference my website’s maximum width. Let’s just put in 1366 and see what happens. Well, it got to 1366, but guys, it has another problem.

It’s not auto-centering itself. So my content in that container is gonna be touching the left edge of the screen. So I have to do the extra work of auto centering this, which would require me to go to margin and do like an auto there, and then do an auto margin here. And now finally I’ve arrived at what more or less Bricks gave me by default out of the box.

So now, can I do it? Yes. Is it a pain in the ass? Yes.

So automatic CSS would do this for you because we recognize the value of it. Where the hell are my notes? Okay, let’s go back. So here’s the workaround.

As I have to document the workarounds, because in three months, six months, I’m not going to know why we did something. I’m going to have to go back and read our notes and say, why is it like this? So what we decided to do, what I decided to do while I was doing this, is I’m going to use at layer to target all the Gutenberg, sorry, the generate blocks containers that are direct children of sections, and I’m gonna set their max inline size to the website’s content width. And I’m gonna set the inline margin to zero to ensure that containers that are direct children of sections are automatically the website’s content width and automatically centered while still allowing the user to easily override this instruction.

And this is the next part of it. It’s very critical. As a framework, we cannot create fixes that then box you in to specific behavior. If we create the fix, if I just target all, let me go, oh God, get rid of Elementor, please.

Okay, thank you. So we’re gonna go back to here. If I just put in an override to automatic CSS to target all containers that are direct children of sections, set their max width, center them automatically, then the user would come over here and they would try to override the max width. Like maybe you want it to be a 960 here.

See how I can set that to 960? Maybe you want it to be 60 characters, right? So 60 characters, see, not 609, 60 characters. There’s 60 characters.

See how I can do that as a user? You should be able to do that as a user. But if I put an override into automatic CSS to do that, suddenly this box no longer works. And that’s not acceptable.

That’s not acceptable, we can’t box people in. So we need a way to set this as the default without overriding the actual builder. Well, you know how we’ve done that, how I’ve worked on doing this? There’s various techniques and strategies.

One is to wrap things in a where tag. Another one is to use at layer. Because if you know anything about at layer, so we’re gonna go to at layer. Actually, we’re gonna go to can I use.

Can I use at layer? Look at the browser support now. See, I was using, you know, where in some cases because there’s more browser support for it, but it’s not quite as clean for organizational purposes. You end up with lots and lots of where statements and it’s not cool.

At layer is very organized. And what at layer does is you can take styles and assign them to a layer in the style sheet. And then you could determine which order layers load in, but that I don’t even really care about. What I care about is the distinct feature of layers is that you can set a style in a layer.

So if I created a layer called generate overrides, I can set styles in that layer and by default any CSS that’s not in a layer, doesn’t matter if it’s in a different layer, it’s just if it’s not in a layer it will take precedence over styles that are in a layer. So what I can do is I can create overrides that give people default behavior but that default behavior is easily overridden by the user using any strategy they want. Can be a class, can be at the ID, doesn’t have to be at the ID, could be inline if they wanted to. They could do it any way, shape, or form.

There’s no limitations whatsoever. It’s a perfect workaround with no downsides, except generate, even though there’s 90% browser support, even though every page builder probably in existence supports at layer, Generate cannot render, I’m sorry, not Generate, don’t wanna throw Generate under the bus. Gutenberg cannot render styles in the builder that are in a layer. Generate, I keep saying Generate, Gutenberg also cannot render at container styles that that’s going to be I mean Okay, what does not even get into that?

Not written. Here’s the thing it actually parses through so when I put styles in an at layer it works on the front end But people users in the Gutenberg builder can’t see the styles that are in a layer And so I go in and I look in GitHub and it turns out, yes, the way Gutenberg processes the CSS breaks at layer. You can’t use it, it’s impossible, you can’t do it. It just won’t work until they somehow find a way to fix it.

So, you know, when I say Gutenberg is an absolute trash can, look, it’s just layer after layer, literally, layer after layer after layer after layer of examples. And this is why I said, when I got to this point where I was like you’ve got to be joking me that you can’t use at layer it works on the front end but nobody can see it in the builder scrap the whole project fire everybody involved in Gutenberg and start over because this this is again it’s an it’s in the trust the amount of money that they have and this is what we’re given on a platform that’s used by like 40% of the internet. Like, are you joking? Somebody make it make sense.

So that’s the goodie. That’s the goodies that I found. Is that what we just can’t do that. So we’re going to have to use a different approach.

And thus the integration with generate is going to take a little bit longer. You know, because that would have worked for bricks, that would have worked for oxygen, but that does not work for our Gutenberg friends. Okay, what was next on our agenda? Let’s go to, let’s bring this out of here.

Let me get back to my notes now. If you guys are in the, we are taking questions now. We’re getting towards the end. I have a question I’m about to answer that was pulled out of my YouTube comments.

That was the next part of our agenda. But go ahead, feel free if you have questions about anything, web design, development, sales, marketing, copywriting, SEO, whatever it is. Just any questions that you want answered, go ahead and start dropping them in the chat because I’m gonna look for them in just a second. All right, I’m gonna go back to my notes for today.

And we are going to go to YouTube, all right? And we’re gonna find WDD24, here we go. Okay, so here is the question that I got. And to give you the context, the context was, I was talking about ugly websites converting really well if they have an amazing offer, an amazing copy, and things like that, right?

And so this user left this comment, which is really insightful, and a really good comment, and a really good question. So, and I couldn’t answer it in the comments, I wanna answer it here. It says, hey man, regarding the quote, what is important for conversions topic, I can’t wrap my head around something. On the one hand, I was always the guy who loved to go in depth about a topic and be as professional and efficient as possible.

Not only when working, but also when learning an instrument and video game or playing poker or whatever it might be. That is the reason why I really enjoy your content because the way you approach things is so similar. And by the way, guys, I want your answer to this question as well. This is a question for all of us sitting here watching, knowing what we know, and just its general philosophy.

That’s the question here, okay? On the other hand, I always feel like it’s almost pointless to focus on all this stuff, and it makes me sad. I mean, as you said, it’s copy and offer is what matters. You can have the shittiest Elementor site with ID or full inline styling, bad layout, divception code, below average load speed.

As long as content and offer are good, you’re gonna have almost or exactly the same conversions as you would with a professional site. Now a client only cares about conversions and money, right? They don’t care if their site is accessible. They don’t care if it does anything.

They care if it gives them more conversions. And yes, while it technically does, accessibility does give a bit more conversions because more people can use the website and have a good experience. It would be best to focus time instead on how to learn better copywriting and things that would have more impact on conversions and also how many clients you get and how much you can charge. I hope you understand my problem, I want to learn the right methods and the best practices and it even feels good but at the same time I feel like I’m losing money this way because I learned stuff almost nobody cares about.

So and I you see why it was you know it’s not really a short question, it’s like, okay, how am I going to respond to that in YouTube comments? So I want to address it here, but I want to also see what you guys think and what your answer might be for a question like that or that general philosophy. So, does what we talk about matter and why does it matter and who does it matter to? So let’s start off with the accessibility side of things.

There’s two angles that I consider to accessibility. The first angle is the monetary economic angle. They’re actually both monetary in a way. There’s actually three angles.

6 1:27:06 There’s actually three angles. 1

1:27:08 So if I have a physical store and I’m like you know what it would cost me a little extra to put a wheelchair ramp in front of my store but what I know is you know somebody in a wheelchair can wheel themselves right up the ramp and buy some shit out my store right a lot easier you know the same thing you know if I want to have like some handicap parking in front of the store why do we have that well because it makes the store more accessible to people with a wallet. That’s just the pure financial side of it. Then there’s like the emotional, mental, human side of it, where it’s like, you know what, I just empathize with people’s disabilities and I, you know, it would be, what does it harm me?

I mean, it’s a few extra bucks to put a ramp in instead of just having a curb. Let’s put the ramp in, like it makes, it makes life easier for people. And so some of this stuff, yeah, it requires a little bit of extra work, a little bit of extra knowledge and things like that. But to actually bake it in once you know what you’re doing, it’s really not that much work, especially as you go.

It’s a lot of work to come back later to a site that’s a disaster and fix everything. But as you go, it’s really not all that much more work. And so it’s just like, hey, let’s make it easier on people. Like we empathize with their situation.

So there’s like an empathy angle, there’s an economic, pure economic angle, there’s also a legal angle, right? So if you think, you know, there is no question that a business owner has in the United States anyway, of should I put in a wheelchair ramp or not put in a wheelchair ramp, because the state has come in and said, you have to put in a wheelchair ramp, you have to put in a wheelchair ramp, you have to have three, you know, handicapped parking spots, and they got to be right in front of the door. You know so there’s this stuff Mandated by law and we do by the way live in a society that loves to do that sort of thing and we already have seen lawsuits Surrounding accessibility so there is a legal implication as well Those are the three angles you have you’re like just emotional human angle you have your legal angle on accessibility. I mean, add all those three things up and it starts to get pretty important, right?

And so, how you sell that to the client, that’s up to you. Or you can just bake it in and raise your prices in general, because it goes along with like, hey, we do everything better. Now, we still get back to the question of, does it matter that you do everything better? Well, there’s other implications.

There are SEO implications to having a shitty divception website, to having a website that loads very slow on mobile devices. Those are SEO implications. General just conversion implications, by the way. So there’s been a bunch of e-commerce websites that have done conversion testing on performance specifically, where it’s like, hey, how much does our purchases decrease, our conversion rate to a purchase, how much does that decrease with every one second of extra page load time?

And it turns out it’s fairly significant. So if you want more performance out of your websites for the purpose of better conversion rates, then suddenly that becomes very important to you. So having a bloated Divi site or a bloated elementor site and you know, you could say, well, we can easily get around that, right? WP rocket, you know, we could.

But I’ll tell you what, a lot of that is just to fake out Google, okay? Like for example, like load until user interaction. Well, a real user’s fucking interacting with the site, my guy. So they’re gonna get all those extra scripts that are causing the site to load very slow.

Whereas Google’s page speed you know thing can’t see it because it’s not a real user and thus you know you see you’re getting your scores up but you’re not impacting the real user as much as you think you are with the speeds but it is a real problem so there’s SEO implications there’s conversion rate implications there’s accessibility implications but then there’s just general professionalism we have to ask ourselves and this is the problem with like a mechanic for example now I don’t know about you and you’re part of the world or whatever but in the United States everybody is kind of scared of mechanics why because you hand your car over to the mechanic and you’re you want them to tell you legitimately what’s wrong with it and then you want them to fix it and you want them to fix it really well so that the fucking problem doesn’t happen again right that’s that’s what you want for mechanics unfortunately it seems very difficult to find why because mechanics are notorious for cutting corners they use shitty parts they use shitty techniques they I don’t know maybe they have low hiring standards I don’t know and then on top of that they tell you about stuff that’s supposedly broken but it turns out isn’t really all that broken. Why? Because they can bill more and they can make more money by fixing more things that don’t really need to be fixed. And so they’ve got in a reputation, the industry has a reputation of, oh yuck, ugly, red flag, I don’t want to deal with it, can I can I trust this person, can I not trust this person, I want to pay as little as possible because I’m probably gonna have to pay again because you know it’s all it’s fakery right dentists dentists in the United States same shit man it’s like who can I trust what dentists can I trust what chiropractor can I trust you know it’s all a race to the bottom it’s all cutting corners it’s all like let’s do as little as we possibly can to make as much money as we possibly can isn’t there an inherent value in professionalism.

But then you look at industries where you can’t cut corners. Cause like when you cut corners, people die, right? When I was in, when I worked in a pharmacy, guys, believe you me, okay, at least when I was there, there was no cutting corners in a pharmacy. There was no, let’s just make things as easy as possible and hire whoever we can find.

Cause when you give people the wrong medication, they actually die, right? Or they get very, very sick. There’s just no cutting corners there. And so they have efficient processes.

They have like actual things in place. They make sure they hire the right kinds of people. Thus, you go to a pharmacy and you get a prescription filled. Hey, I need this.

Please give me that. You know, you’re going to get the right stuff. and there’s not like a whole industry of red flags around pharmacies. They’re at a race to the top, not a race to the bottom.

We’re all working in an industry and we get to decide and we must decide. Do we want our industry racing to the bottom? Or do we want our industry to be looked at in a specific light, which is professionalism, high prices because you you are getting a very valuable thing in return for the money that you are paying. The idea, the idea that a company should pay a thousand dollars for a website that they’re generating as a company hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue a year, millions of dollars in revenue a year, the idea that their central marketing hub on the internet is a thousand dollars that they get to get away with that like that you should bust your ass not cut corners do everything cross every T dot every I and then get a thousand dollars for that at the end of the day all the work that you put in and the amount of value that they hopefully get out of this thing that you’re handing over to them or managing for them is what you should be doing no they should pay accordingly they should pay accordingly.

They should pay accordingly. And if we think about other things that they have to invest in, I don’t know why web designers can’t seem to ever compare and contrast properly. When I had a martial arts studio, right, physical location. Okay, so I have to go get a actual spot.

I have to rent the spot. I got to do a lot of things. I got to invest money in a lot of different areas. The spot that we chose that we wanted to invest in because it was a good location, it had good visibility, it was the center of the complex, right?

So you couldn’t come into the complex without seeing it. It was the predominant thing. $5,500 per month. Then we had to buy mats.

We got to pay, I don’t know what it was, $30,000 in mats. And then we’ve got to have this and we’ve got to have that. We’ve got to have a glass wall to make the viewing. There’s a lot of things that we got to invest in.

We’re throwing tens of thousands of dollars around like it’s nothing. And that’s for a small, local, little business, right? And then for some reason, web designers are like, people can’t afford $2,500 for their central marketing hub on the internet. Who the fuck can afford that?

My guy, like, you know what these business owners are spending like not on you not to mention you know the guy I was partnered with had a $80,000 Porsche SUV was dropping a thousand dollars at a time on new tires and this other shit and you’re like all these guys can’t afford $2,500 for their central marketing hub, who can afford that? This is like the stuff I continue to hear web designer after web designer tell me. Are you serious? Guys, they will spend $2,500 on fucking alcohol and gambling in Vegas without a second thought.

And you’re like, oh, they’ll never pay for a website like that. They’ll just never, they’ll never spend that kind of money on a website. 3 1:36:50

It’s a joke. 1 1:36:51 It’s an absolute joke.

Now think of everything that you have to learn, everything that you have to manage, everything that you have to know to actually do a website successfully. And we’re gonna take a look at some of the best websites of 2023 here in a minute too, because this kind of ties into all of this. But it’s just, it’s insane to me. Guys, you should be making $10,000 for a website.

You should be making $20,000 for a website. Now, if we were, let’s just put on our thinking caps, if I was making $15,000 for a website, don’t you think now I can afford to cross Ts and dot Is? Hey, don’t you think it’s in the best interest of clients for them to pay what it’s worth and then have you do the work the right way and don’t you think if that was the industry standard that when somebody it pops into their head that like you know what we need a website for this business they don’t go looking for somebody who’s going to charge them 2,500 they expect to pay 15,000 because when I when I go to buy I just bought an infinity QX80. That’s for my wife.

Because our van, and this is not like, I hate spending money on cars. I hate spending money on cars. I hate spending money on clothes. I hate spending money on things, things, okay?

I’ll spend money on property. I’ll spend money on investments. I’ll spend money on, I want my money to make money. That’s what I want to have.

A car makes me no money. I hate spending money on a car. So to illustrate this, we had a 2012 Honda Odyssey. Okay, fucking balling, right?

Absolutely balling. It was the Touring Edition, but we bought it used. It had 167,000 miles on it, right? I could buy a new car every two years and just start over at zero miles and it’d be fantastic, right?

That’s not a good investment. That’s not a good strategy. I try to keep things to like the wheels fall off of it. So literally, the wasn’t the wheels falling off of the engine, which is a Honda, it shouldn’t really happen, right?

But the engine had some sort of oil leak, it was like consuming oil. And so it gets low on oil, like after, you know, 800 miles or something where, you know, oil should obviously last a lot longer than that. And I took it into the mechanic and they were actually like, oh, yeah, this is a known issue with that year. And Honda actually did a recall and they did an extended warranty.

But lucky you, you’re outside of the extended warranty period. So that can’t be fixed anymore. And I was like, well, what’s the fix for? He’s like, well, we just have to take the engine apart and we have to rebuild the whole thing.

And it’s like four thousand dollars. And I’m like, the van’s not even worth that much money. So it’s just it’s gone. It’s totaled, right?

It’s like get rid of it. So we were forced to buy a new vehicle. So I buy my wife an Infinity QX80 used. Okay, again used.

So but I walk into the Infinity dealership. Do you think when that popped into my mind like we’re gonna have to get a new car? What a dollar amount popped into my mind? Well, it wasn’t $2,500, I’ll tell you that, right?

I’m thinking, all right, well, it’s, you know, 30,000, 40,000, somewhere in that range, that’s probably what I’m expecting to spend. And you walk into the establishment with that number in your brain. Right now, we, why? Because now I could walk into a used car lot looking for a $2,500 vehicle.

Those exist, there’s lots of them. But if you walk into an infinity dealership, you think different numbers. Why do you think different numbers? Because you have an association with this brand or this industry, the industry of luxury vehicles causes you to think certain numbers, right?

So the question is, when somebody thinks web design, I need a website, what number do you want or that you hope would pop into their head? Do you hope that $2,500 pops into their head? Or do you hope that like $15,000 pops into their head? And then you say, well, Kevin, what, $15,000?

Let me remind you, this is a company that they want to rank, they want all the traffic. Look at how greedy they are. I’m just, I’m obviously, you know, being facetious, but look at how greedy they are. They want all the rankings.

They want all the traffic. They want leads. They want sales. They want that.

They want lots of valuable things. These are valuable things to a business. The lifeblood of a business, you could argue, right? What’s a business without leads and sales?

Not much of a business. It’s kind of a hobby. Seems like very important things that they really, really, really, really, really, really want. And so what are they going to turn around and pay for these things?

Well, you are just inviting them to pay $2,500, apparently, or $1,000, or $500, or whatever it may be. Everybody that’s racing to the bottom and making excuse after excuse after excuse of they won’t pay this much, they can’t pay this much, they shouldn’t pay this much. My gosh. My gosh.

You want them to think $2,500. You must want them to think that, right? When they think I need a website. We need them to think $15.

We need them to think $20. For the same reason, guys, what would my martial arts studio have been without that $5,500 per month, per month location, right in a good visibility, center of the thing. How much worse, could I have gotten a spot around the corner for half that amount? Absolutely, but what impact would that have had on my business, right?

So you invest more to get more value. Now, if you don’t know how to provide value, if you don’t know how to check the boxes that are very important to a business, then by all means, I mean, charge them 500 bucks, that’s all they’re going to get in return, and you know, it’s a fair deal, whatever. But that’s not the industry. That’s people that don’t know what they’re doing.

That’s racing to the bottom. So the reason we talk about standards, the reason we talk about professionalism, the reason we talk about crossing T’s and dotting I’s, the reason we talk about accessibility, the reason we talk about good design, the reason we talk about good copywriting, the reason why everything we talk about is because the more people that are on board, everything rises, just like the view we have of Infinity, just like the view we have of Porsche, just like the view we have of Lexus, just like the view we have of Apple, just like all of the, you want to be a brand and an industry that people respect because when people have respect for it and they value it they also pay more for it because it’s uncommon it’s uncommon it’s common to build shitty websites if you want to race to the bottom here’s what’s going to happen I haven’t even done the framer thing yet but Elementor users framer users the fact that framer even exists, the Squarespace users, the Wix users, these people will put you out of a job. If that’s all people know about and care about, your job is gone. There’s only a job and money for people that know what they’re doing.

If you want to put yourself in the camp of, it doesn’t really matter, we don’t need any standards, we don’t need any professionalism, we don’t need to worry about these things. You’re out of a job. You’re by default competing with everybody. Just like a photographer.

It’s like a photographer comes along, ah, it doesn’t really matter if you know photography or exposure or manual exposure or how to edit properly in Photoshop. You just use Photoshop AI to do a bunch of stuff these days. You buy some filter kits or whatever to put on your photos. You’re off to the races.

Congratulations, you’re competing with every other person that wants to buy a DSLR on Amazon and call themselves a photographer and race to the bottom with those kinds of bullshit prices. That’s who you’re now competing with. And what you’re going to create is an entire industry like the mechanic industry where people come and they’re like, shit, I really need somebody that knows what they’re doing but what I see is an ocean of people that don’t know what they’re doing using all these like beginner tools how do I know if if this one person I’m about to choose knows what they’re doing or not and so it’s red flags it’s question marks it’s I don’t know I don’t know and so what should I do as a buyer in that situation? Well, I should spend as little as possible because I might fucking lose it.

It might get lit on fire. Like if I’ve chosen the wrong person, this money is gonna go down the drain. And we already see this with like, how many web design agencies start projects and then disappear? How many plugin developers start projects and then disappear after they get everybody’s LTD money?

It’s a constant thing. So you’re always wondering like, ah, is this money gonna get lit on fire or is something valuable gonna come of this? We do not want that to be in people’s minds when they think about our industry. We want them to think professionalism, crossing T’s, dotting I’s, valuable, valuable returns and I gotta invest money.

That’s what we want them to think. How do you get them to think that? You act that way. You act professional.

You know what you’re doing. You know what you’re talking about. You demand excellence of others. And if you’re a leader, you try to put this kind of stuff out as content.

You don’t say, use whatever builder you want, do whatever you want. Everybody’s got a different opinion. That’s how we race to the bottom. Okay.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole thing. All right, let’s go in and see what the comments. I wanna answer a couple of questions and I know people are waiting for their questions and then we’re gonna take a look at the best websites of 2023.

I got a little bit more time. Okay. Oh, wow, I gotta scroll way back up. Okay.

The millions of Elementor users are not here. Let’s move on. But see, it ties into everything. They affect us even though they’re not here, is the problem.

Yes, Kevin, they were first and free in a time that there were no other decent GUI GUI options. Yes, I’ve actually said that before. I said, when there was nothing, Elementor was probably a good choice. And there’s no argument for that.

You’re right, you’re 100% right. What the argument is, it’s now 2023. That’s no longer the reality. And so creators should not continue to recommend these tools.

And it’s inexplicable that they do. Okay, Elementor has just had really good marketing. Da da da da da, okay. I haven’t watched something so funny in a long time.

3 1:47:59 Your answer elements are pure gold. 1

1:48:01 I mean, the material writes itself, honestly. Let’s see. Okay.

Spacer units are great for demonstrating how bad Elementor is. It’s a drag and drop widget aiming to let anybody design a website easy peasy without giving an F about what you’re doing. Exactly. Yes.

Plug back in your mouse and check your blood pressure will do. Okay, I don’t, Louis did not coin that phrase, a divception, that’s been around for a while. All right, without a spacer element, 3

1:48:32 you cannot cramp your DOM uselessly. 1 1:48:34

Okay, so we got a lot of spacer element comments. Okay, let’s keep scrolling down, down, down, down, down. Wait till Bricks becomes a subscription and then there would be an affiliate commission for Bricks too. It’s fine to have an affiliate program for things.

I have an affiliate program for automatic CSS. I’m going to have an affiliate program for frames. I believe in rewarding creators for creating content. What I don’t believe in is these creators who chase the commissions saying anything that they need to say to cash those checks and I’ll let you know guys a lot of creators they they they quit their other work right to be a creator and so that is the monetary the main monetary source in some cases when they get into the higher levels of being a quote-unquote influencer and so the easiest way for them to make more money and keep cashing checks is to just say what needs to be said and you know if it comes down to a C, when I get on YouTube, I can say whatever I want because I’m not relying on affiliate commissions.

I have my own products that I believe in. I make my case for those products. I also do agency work, which I’ve toned down a lot of, but I also just educate. Like my money comes from educating.

It doesn’t come from convincing you to use one tool over another tool. That’s not where the money comes from. I educate. Through the education process, you’re going to discover, like hey, automatic CSS, frames, they make this process of doing things like a professional workflow way easier, way faster, without cutting corners.

In fact, it actually does things a lot better than I would do it on my own. I think I’m gonna invest in those tools. That’s just the general conclusion that people come to. When you take people who don’t necessarily know what they’re doing and say, hey, you, you’re not an idiot, come on over here for a second, let me show you some stuff, okay, great, you know, because I’ve been doing this a long time, it’s like, you know, it is a lot of technical stuff to learn, but there’s a big difference in going, you’re a moron, here’s a tool that’s going to try to make up for your moronicness, and then there’s plan B, which is, hey, you, I see you want to be in web design.

I see you want to consider yourself to be a professional. I see you want to use this trade to put a lot of money on your family’s table. Let me show you, you’re not a moron, let me show you how to do things a really great way, scalable, maintainable, accessible, best practices, and so you can be proud of the work that you do and you can work in a professional industry. Big difference, big difference, right?

So I’m free to do that. Where other creators are like, nah, these people are morons, I just need affiliate commissions, let’s go. Let’s get them to buy whatever we can get them to buy. I can’t respect that side of being a creator.

Okay. 3 1:51:31 Questions, I’m looking for questions.

1 1:51:33 Kevin’s ecosystem I think is the way to go if you want to scale up I’m not a professional from web design, but I do want to do the correct work for users ACSS suite is the way to go for me now Okay, people are talking about cadence Do you like bricks over oxygen? Yes 100% I’ll just continue to reiterate bricks is number one Oxygen is number two.

And then if you really need something integrated with Gutenberg, then I would say to probably go with quickly. 3 1:52:07 Now, there’s other page builders that,

1 1:52:09 like Bill Darius, for example. So, the developer of Bill Darius is actually in the inner circle, and he’s trying to get me to take a deeper look, a closer look at Bill Darius, which I do plan on doing, because apparently there’s some promising things that he really wants me to look at and You know, he understands the workflow that I advocate for and on and on and on so I just haven’t had time I will look at build areas a little bit more in detail And so things can change things can obviously change but right now it’s bricks number one and it would be oxygen number two Will you create your own page builder this is a hmm, you know, I said at one point, hell no.

At one point I was like, hell no. I’m not in the hell no camp anymore. I’m not in the hell no camp. I’m in the intrigue camp because I think, here’s the thing.

I look at the discussion about page builders all about what’s the best page builder right now. And honestly, they’re all very, not all, there’s a collection that are very close to each other. Like I flat out said, use oxygen if you wanna use oxygen, use Bricks if you wanna use Bricks, right? I put Bricks number one, oxygen number two.

They share the same fundamental workflow, the same fundamental UI, the same fundamental everything. Bricks is better in many different capacities, but it’s when you get deeper into the details right surface level they’re more or less the same thing so you know if I’m thinking about getting into a page builder land would I ever come in and be like you know what I’m going to take what I love about bricks and what I love about oxygen and I’m going to make a builder that looks just like them but it’s going to be a little bit better and and we’re going to get rid of some of the downsides of it. Hell no, no, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever would I ever get into the page builder space with that as the vision. Now, if there was a very different vision for how things should be done, then yes, I might.

Does that vision exist? Let’s move on. 3 1:54:29

Okay. 4 1:54:30 Question makes sense.

1 1:54:31 Okay, that was about something else. Tony says, personal pride and trying to do it right

4 1:54:35 is what drives me. 1

1:54:36 Yeah, I mean, there’s also that too. Like I said, there’s just some personalities are like, I want to do it the best that I possibly can. And if it requires extra time, can and If it requires extra time and it requires extra effort to do it, right?

I’m still gonna do it that way I’m gonna find a way to monetize that right? I’m gonna my my client should pay more But that’s the thing, you know, it’s when you buy an infinity You know that when you reach for the dial on the radio that it’s not going to be a plastic fucking knob That’s half falling off like it might be in a Ford or something right so you there’s a you know that as a user when you get into the thing it’s gonna be nicer oh look it’s nicer in here I paid more money hey there’s real leather look at that and it’s not going to be cracking on you and the paints not going to be chipping off in a couple years and you know that when you invest more and so most companies who actually care about their business don’t want a cheap, shoddy-ass website. Again, you have to understand users better. You have to understand clients better.

If you actually care about your business, it’s like, I wanna find a designer that actually knows what they’re doing. I wanna find a developer that actually knows what they’re doing. We can see this very clearly in the app development space, right? And think of app development, oh, this is a perfect, perfect example.

When you think I need an app or any company thinks I need an app for that, do you know what money they think in their mind? They don’t think $2,500. You can’t get an app for that. You’re going to think $25,000, $50,000, $75,000, $100,000.

It depends on how complex the app is, but you’re thinking big numbers by default, okay? And that’s what that side of the industry demands. They demand big numbers, because it’s important work, and you can’t tell me that you’re gonna take this app and try to make hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars with this app and pay me $2,500. You don’t think, like, the amount of thought and effort and experience and expertise that has to go into that, you think you’re gonna get away with that kind of investment?

Nah, dog, no, that’s not gonna happen. We have to treat our stuff the way that they treat their stuff. And people are gonna think about us in the exact same light. Because what we do is, in fact, very valuable.

And they don’t want their website falling apart, right? They don’t want the, and when I say fall apart, what does that mean? Because it’s not just gonna miraculously start dissolving on people. But the copy can suck, and thus they don’t get the conversions that they wanted, they don’t get the leads that they wanted.

The UX can suck, thus they don’t get the conversions and leads that they wanted. Thus, they’re not gonna rank, right? They wanted to be number one, but now they’re on page five, why? Well, the person they hired didn’t know what they were doing.

So, right, it can fail, and it fails often, over and over and over and over again people invest in websites and these websites fail them and then you know what happens when that happens so many times they get the idea in their head I need to invest my money elsewhere this website that I haven’t I haven’t been able to find anybody that can make the website work the way that I wanted to and get me the results that I want I need to go invest in billboards or fucking social media or any number of other things that they can invest in to try to get eyeballs on their business and money in their pocket. They’re not going to turn to us because if they’ve hired three of us and we’ve all failed at some point they’re going to be like I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep doing this. So do you want that to happen?

The answer has to be no if you want a future in this industry. We have to be successful in what we’re delivering to clients. Thus, we can’t have everybody running around with Elementor, just like in photography. How many photographers do you have to hire where the photos suck and they ruined your wedding, right?

If you’re hiring a photographer for a wedding, you make sure that this person knows what the hell they’re doing. I wanna see every wedding you’ve ever shot, please, on your website. I wanna make sure you were the lead photographer on the wedding, not just a participant photographer in the wedding, right? I want to make sure it was your clients that you did this work for.

And then when I check those boxes, you know what that person’s going to tell me? It’s 20 grand. They’re not going to tell me it’s $2,500 dog. There is not a $2,500 wedding photographer that is going to be consistent in their output because all of the ones that are good enough to know what it takes to make amazing wedding photos every single time.

They know enough to know they can’t do that for $2,500. It’s not physically possible. So they’re going to charge you $15,000. And again, how many examples do I have to give?

We do not want people looking at our industry the way they look at general photographers. General photographers if I go hire a family for that everybody and their mom with a DSLR is like oh I do photos You know it’s 500 bucks. I’ll take your family portraits if you if you screw up family portraits I can get them reshot, but if you screw up my wedding, that’s a different story if You screw up my mom’s bunko site. That’s one thing if you screw up my actual business website.

That’s a completely different thing So it’s just again. It’s how we have to look at this. 3 2:00:02

All right, I had a client who wanted to go back to Wix 1 2:00:04 because he wanted to do more by himself.

End of story, he hired somebody for good money to build his Wix site. Now leads and sales drop. Yeah, I mean, this is the common story. Okay, I saw some questions, maybe I scrolled up too far.

Just listening to you has improved my work tenfold. Thank you. 6 2:00:27

And I appreciate it. 1 2:00:29 Diviitis.

3 2:00:30 Okay, I gotta get back. 1

2:00:31 I gotta get past all the Elementor discussions. I think we’re done there. Da da da da da da da da da.

5 2:00:36 Okay. 1

2:00:37 Yes, and bad code makes it harder to maintain a site. That’s where costs become obvious, exactly. That’s where your client starts paying for nonsense, paying for your inefficiency.

Okay, I don’t know where the, that pause was so pregnant, I think it’s having quintuplets. Okay, where would the questions go? They were there a minute ago. I’m gonna do like three questions here.

3 2:01:07 Are you sticking with Google domains, I found one. 1

2:01:09 Are you sticking with Google domains with Squarespace’s recent acquisition of the tool? If not, what domain provider do you recommend? I have not decided yet.

I used to use Hover back in the day. I used to use Hover for pretty much everything. Still use CloudFlare for DNS, but I may go back to Hover. I’m gonna take a look.

I haven’t made a decision yet. Question, how do you convince your job to switch to BRICS from Elementor? They are an entertainment events based and don’t want to have the sites off. Should I build them on the side and then convince?

What do you mean by job? Do you work for a business that’s using Elementor or do you work for an agency that’s building Elementor sites for other businesses? That would be my question. If it’s, if you work for a business, a company, and they use Elementor for their websites, I would, first of all, I mean, just have a conversation with them and just see, you gotta feel them out, right?

Are they even open to using something different? If they’re open to it and they just want really good reasons, then you can just show them the really good reasons. And then if you have to, like I’m the kind of person where I’m just like, dog, I will show you. I’m not gonna charge you, I’m gonna rebuild just the homepage maybe in Bricks, and then I’m gonna show them the differences.

I’m gonna show them class-based workflow, I’m gonna show them how this improves maintainability and scalability and accessibility. I’m gonna show them how it improves performance. I’m gonna show them the SEO implications, the conversion implications, I’m gonna show them all that stuff and I’ll do that on my own time just to make the Point why because I don’t want to be forced into using this nonsense elements or workflow just because I work for this company So yeah, it’s a I’ve rebuilt sites for clients. There’s there’s been sites where we built that we had some divi sites back in the day and Once we really just decided, you know, we’re not going to put up with this shit anymore.

We’re going to do everything the right way with the, with the best builders that we can get our hands on. Um, I, I didn’t, there was no way I was going to be caught dead, like opening the, the Divi site and making the edits and key. I just was like, okay, what we’re going to say is, Hey, your site needs to be rebuilt. We’ll rebuild it for half price.

Okay. Like, you know, just let us, cause we don’t want to manage this anymore. We don’t want to be on Divi anymore. Half price, we’ll rebuild it for you on bricks.

Here’s everything that you’re going to get out of it. We’re going to improve the design when we do it. We’re going to update everything, yada, yada, yada, half price. Most of them were like, yeah, sure.

A couple were like, nah, just keep us on Divi. Like, we don’t want to go through all that. Those like two or three sites, I just rebuilt them, like for free. And I was like, we did it anyway, we have to get rid of this, we’re not gonna manage Divi anymore, we have to get rid of this.

So I just rebuilt it for free. And really it was just for my own benefit, our own benefit as in it was just me at the time, way back when. But I just did it for my own benefit, because I don’t, I’m not gonna work in that workflow anymore. So sometimes you just gotta take it on the chin, you know?

And if you believe in what you say, then you should be willing to take it on the chin sometimes. 4 2:04:28 Can you go into your position

1 2:04:29 on allowing clients to edit their sites? Well, I have a whole video about that.

I have a whole video about that. If it’s worth it to create a simple interface for them to do so, custom fields, et cetera. Yeah, I have a whole video dedicated to that. It’s called Stop Letting Clients Edit Their Websites, something like that, F-T-L-O-G, for the love of God, stop letting clients edit their websites.

Does that mean that a client should never log into their website? No. Does that mean that you should ban them from logging into their website? No.

Does that mean that you should prevent them in any way, shape or form from owning a website? No. None of those arguments are anything that I advocate for. Does that mean you should never create custom fields for things that a client should be heavily advised away from ever touching.

And there are severe implications for them touching it. And people don’t make those arguments, unfortunately, but I have to make them. Right? Like, should a client be able to edit all the copy on a sales page?

3 2:05:31 No. 1

2:05:33 And when I say, Hey, you’re not going to touch this right? And like wink, wink. Because here’s what’s going to happen.

If you do right now, you paid us to write all this copy. Okay. And you paid us for the layout and we did the layout a certain way and we did the copy a certain way and we presented the offer a certain way. We did a lot of things a certain way and when we do that and we take control of that and ownership of that we also own the results.

So when you’re like man this sales page is going like gangbusters Kevin thank you so much and I’m like you’re welcome Mr. Client you know that’s why we do what we do. That’s a fantastic outcome however when the landing page doesn’t quite do what we wanted it to do or expected it to do or hoped we would do. We’re going to try to figure out why.

And we’re going to take ownership of that. And you say, you know, you’re right. It’s not performing as well as it should. Here’s what we’re going to do to attempt to make it better.

And we’re going to continue running A, B test after A, B test until we can get this dialed in and getting you the results that we talked about in the beginning. So we’re going to own it either way. But the conversation I have with the client is, cause they’ll be like, well, you know, we just want to change some headlines. So we just want to move some things around, you know.

Do you know what the SEO implications of doing that is? Do you know what the conversion implications of doing that is? So I just want you to know, Mr. Client, if you make those changes, we can no longer take ownership of the results that you’re going to get.

That’s going to be on you, right? Because those things have major implications. And so if you wanted us to get you specific rankings or specific amount of leads or anything like that, we can only own that outcome, own those goals, if we own what’s happening on the website. The minute you start shuffling shit around and rewriting things and swapping photos and all this other stuff, well now this is a completely different experience.

Well, we didn’t build this experience, how could we possibly take ownership for that experience? So the goals are no longer on us, the goals are now on you. Oh you just did that because you wanted to, not because of any data or any like when’s the last time you looked at your analytics Mr. Client?

Because we all know, come on Bev, you think Bev fucking looks at the analytics? No, Bev doesn’t know a lick of analytics. She doesn’t know what the data is, what it says, how many visitors, she doesn’t know. So I mean we’re not making data based decisions, what are we doing?

Making Bev’s emotional, like, I just, I kind of like it this way. I kind of like it when the heading says this. I kind of like it when this image is there instead of the other one. Right?

Well, Bev, that’s not great for conversions, it turns out. So that’s the argument that I make of like, generally, and if you know my sales process, we’re not pixel pushers. So we’re not like, hey, we’re just gonna make you a pretty website and then we’re gonna hand it over. We talk about goals.

Hey, we talk about getting more traffic. We talk about SEO rankings. We talk about leads and conversions. We talk about the importance of copywriting and making more dollars at the end of the day.

These are the goals that we have. So we have to do things a certain way to achieve those goals. If somebody comes behind us and starts making all these changes, number one that we’re not even documenting. I mean my gosh do you know what A-B testing is?

Like if you’re gonna make changes you document the change then you track the data and now you know what change impacted the data. If somebody’s coming behind you even if they make good changes, if it’s not, if we don’t know what changed, we can’t even replicate that on other pages. So like, and do you think a client is documenting any of the stuff that they’re doing to a website? So this is not a serious approach.

This is just like, oh, once again, it’s like, just let people do whatever they want, as if there’s no implications of that behavior. So I just understand that there’s consequences to making changes on a website. Client swaps out a perfectly optimized image for a five megabytes file. Are you telling me that there’s no implications to doing that?

And then somebody is gonna be like, well, but that’s the client’s fault. It’s on them, right? Yeah, so it’s all there. But wait a minute, stop, pause, timeout.

As the hired expert, I have the best interest of my client in mind at all times. So I’m not going to do things that negatively impact their business, including letting them touch the website because they don’t know what they’re doing. That goes into that umbrella of like, I have their best interest in mind. It’s kind of like a UFC fighter.

Okay, if I’m the corner man for a UFC fighter, I do my best. I’m like, all right, we’re going to train you. We’re going to get you the skills you need. I’m going to send you in the ring, champ.

Okay, and you send them in the ring. And then they’re getting pummeled in the face repeatedly, and the ref is asleep. And it’s like, ref, he’s going to die. Okay, what do I have to do?

Well, I could sit there in the corner and be like, well, you know, that’s the fighter. He didn’t show up on Monday. He didn’t do the necessary training he should have done. I guess he’s gonna die today.

No, I have his best interest at heart still. And I throw in the fucking towel. I please stop the fight. He’s gonna die.

Right. So you you have to we see this in other industries, like, you have to have the client’s best interest even when they want to do things that are against their best interest. Now does that mean like physically barring them from doing it? No, but it means sitting them down and having a very serious conversation.

Bev, when you change all the copy on the landing page, the conversions are going to decline. When you swapped out the photo with a five megabyte file, our performance went in the toilet. Let’s stop doing that Bev, okay? But really you have the conversation ahead of time.

You just let them know, hey, look, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you really can’t be doing this stuff because there are major consequences of doing it. 2 2:11:50 So that’s it.

1 2:11:52 You wanted my thoughts, that’s my thoughts. Okay, I think we’re over time today.

As always, I do thank you for being here and showing up, having great questions, having some good comments to inject. There’s a few more questions here, but we are out of time for them. I am going on vacation soon. I am going to do my absolute best to do a WDD Live while I’m gone.

And I’m gonna have some other videos, a couple other videos lined up on the channel. But I also have some really cool stuff to talk about when I get back. But I hope you guys got a lot of value out of today’s stream. Again, I get back.

But I hope you guys got a lot of value out of today’s stream. Again, I thank you for being here and I will see you again very, very soon. Peace.